Lenovo Stops Superfish Preloads and Issues Advisory 21 February 2015, by Nancy Owano

Lenovo stops Superfish preloads and issues advisory 21 February 2015, by Nancy Owano

previously included on some consumer notebook products shipped between September 2014 and February 2015, said Lenovo. The company also said that the software has never been installed on any enterprise product—servers or storage—and these products were in no way impacted. Also, Lenovo said it never installed this software on ThinkPad notebooks nor Lenovo desktops or smartphones.

Superfish is a Palo Alto, California-based company which, with patented technology, developed a visual search engine. Writing in Bloomberg, Jordan Robertson said, "Superfish uses image-recognition algorithms that watch where users point on their screens and suggest ads based on the images they're looking at." The problem, said security Lenovo has seen calmer weeks. News sites in watchers, is that it could potentially expose users to droves rang chimes and sirens over an adware unauthorized activity monitoring. Robertson made program on some Lenovo models escalating to the point that in general pre-installed software concerns about the potential risk of a Man in the poses security and privacy concerns because Middle threat. Lenovo has been attempting to meet questionable behavior is hard to detect and the storm head-on and has stopped preloads of programs may be difficult to uninstall. the program called Superfish. In a statement, Lenovo said, "In our effort to enhance our user Lenovo's own security advisory issued the potential experience, we pre-installed a piece of third-party impact as "Man-in-the-Middle Attack" and called the software, Superfish (based in Palo Alto, CA), on severity "High." Lenovo said it ordered the pre-load some of our consumer notebooks. We thought the removal in January and that "We will not preload product would enhance the shopping experience, this software in the future." as intended by Superfish. It did not meet our expectations or those of our customers. In reality, The advisory's description was of "Superfish we had customer complaints about the software." intercept HTTP(S) traffic using a self-signed root certificate. This is stored in the local certificate store Lenovo went on to discuss their response. "We and provides a security concern." acted swiftly and decisively once these concerns began to be raised. We apologize for causing any On Friday, PCWorld senior editor Brad Chacos had concern to any users for any reason – and we are the good news. "Bravo!" ran the headline to his always trying to learn from experience and improve story. "Windows Defender update fully removes what we do and how we do it. We stopped the Lenovo's dangerous Superfish malware." Chacos preloads beginning in January. We shut down the reported that Microsoft updated its Windows server connections that enable the software also in Defender to eradicate both the adware itself and January, and we are providing online resources to the certificate potentially allowing encrypted web help users remove this software." Superfish was traffic to be compromised. Chacos said that a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that "Microsoft

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security software detects and removes the Superfish software from Lenovo devices." Ed Bott in ZDNet on Friday similarly reported that Microsoft released the latest definitions for its Windows Defender software, included "as a standard feature on all Windows 8.x PCs. The new definitions, which are installed automatically, detect and remove the offending app and the certificate."

Update: As of Saturday, Chris Duckett, reporting in ZDNet, said that Lenovo has offered a removal tool.

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